Media My Great and Undying Hate for the Toyota Scion
posted by on August 14 at 15:37 PM
The whole premise of the Toyota Scion marketing campaign is barf (posters that look like they’re advertising goth dance nights, its whole “Little Deviant” character—oh, the deviance of new car ownership!), but the genocidal video game, wherein our Lil’ Deviant runs around a city, killing all the “sheeple,” is its nadir. The game is so bad, it’s almost a hate crime.
Visit this site. Type in the password “scralp,” which will take you to the “Slaughter Park” level (it takes a little while to load), where you can, in the words of the game, “track down each Sheeple and give them a beating that they will never forget!”
A screen shot:
Hm. A little urban badass running around a park at night “giving a beating” to barely human male-creatures who hang out behind bushes and paint the city in some white, viscous fluid—not to mention the clumsily Freudian addition of luring them to their collective doom with the, er, hot dog cart…
Is it just me, or is Toyota trying to sell cars with thinly veiled and extremely fucked-up gay-bashing fantasies?
(Thanks to Nevdon for the tip.)
What the fuck do you care? I thought you were straight?
It's bully advertising. Or marketing to bullies.
Either way, I don't like it. It pisses me off.
is brendan actually chaz? i mean, finding gay bashing subtext in a bashing subtext is something chaz would do, except it would have to be red and black being spilled about. then chaz could claim that you were beating the snot out of albino black people full of watermelon.
also, the marketing campaign sucks ass. there is nothing risky or deviant buying a car. unless its an MG.
OK, the ad campaign is highly obnoxious.
But why do you assume that the sheep are gay?
5: Paranoia maybe. It could just as easily be immigrants or blacks or women. It's stupid marketing though.
oh, and that new Toyota Extreme thing, hummer like. god i first the saw the inadvertant real-time commercial out last week south of Fife, but the obnoxious Killer swooped in front of me going a local roundabout yesterday.
so yeah, i prefer my junk toYota, 3 times its value put in repairs. and it got me here in ok lake wash blvd time. now i'm in that Lake City store with wi-fi, cool music AND free movies! Double shot of Harold/Mude with Beatles - You Won't See Me, Lovely Rita on and yawn...!
dedicated to Dave and Sean Gregory- Million Sellers and "Hey, C'mon, let the show begin...("cause I can't wait"/ altos)..
Do you think SPD Detective Ron Smith drives a Scion?
SERIOUSLY?
"Turn that awful bleating into awesome bleeding."
WTF!?!?!!?
my bust, XTREME-ly clever
is pooh sticks high?
To me, when I first saw these ads, I thought it was strange that they were focusing their entire campaign around a website that mostly appeals to the 10-15 year old demographic.
It's a lot of work to see a crappy little car. Toyota should know better.
OH quit pissing yourselves, ladies.
This is obviously a farce that is well-executed and well-marketed, if it's even making its way into one of the most-read blogs (this one) in a major market.
The Scion xB is a car firmly planted in the NOW. But it is firmly planted in the Beyond-Now as well, what with an exterior design/chassis that seems almost brutalist compared to the staunchly aerodynamic stylings of today's automobiles.
Thus, this marketing campaign wisely exists as a playful Beyond-Now gimmick in itself -- choosing a medium (video games) that reaches a knowing target (30-something men who drive modern brutalist vehicles) while poking fun at the idiocy of video games themselves, just like the xB pokes fun at the idiocy of American vehicles. Like Body Count's "Cop Killer" it is at once a political statement and a modicum for entertainment shrouded in a beautastic legacy of parody.
The merit in this project exists both in its concept and execution. So I like it.
Only a plug-in hybrid or a biodiesel 100 mpg car is "edgy".
The rest are all 19th century concepts.
You can perform as much postmodern deconstruction as you like, #14, but the fact remains that this is some creepy shit that blatantly glamorizes brutal, arbitrary violence against helpless victims.
If it did this in the service of some sort of commentary, it would be one thing. But it's not a witty allegory, nor cleverly subversive in any way; it's a love letter to thugs.
The fact that it fails to justify using anthropomorphic characters and a realistic urban setting (i.e. by making a point of some kind) just makes it all the more loathsome.
You know, if I said the same thing about a video game like "Manhunt," most people would probably rush to defend it.
I'd be one of them; I'd defend both on First Amendment grounds. That doesn't keep me from thinking that the Toyota marketing crew are a bunch of loutish douchebags for hatching this revolting game.
Hot dogs and bushes automatically means gay men? Who's the one with the fucking problem here?
Thinly vieled? Are you fucking insane?
And I'm the angriest gay man in America, so trust me I would get pissed if there was something there.
There isn't
Ugly ads. Ugly car.
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